Serota portfolio at center of lawsuit

A Valley Stream-based company pitching a $300 million mixed-use project for 135 acres in Holbrook is embroiled in a lawsuit over control of its 5 million-square-foot commercial real estate portfolio.

The sons of the late shopping center developer Nathan Serota have sued his widow and company executives over an alleged scheme to wrest control of the family’s sizeable real estate assets.

Charles and Geoffrey Serota claim that their step-mom Vivian Serota, Lighthouse Realty Partners CFO Joseph Scimone and Lighthouse counsel Michael Cassidy exerted “undue influence” to get their ailing 90-year-old father to sign a 29-page management agreement that gave Lighthouse principals 6 percent of the firm’s $50 million annual rent roll without any liability.

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Scimone declined to discuss and the Serotas could not be reached to comment on the lawsuit.

The Serota sons maintain that their father was “physically and mentally incapacitated” and he did not have “knowing or intelligent consent” when he penned his name to the document they are seeking to make null and void. The complaint also alleges that Nathan Serota had refused to sign the same agreement in 2003.

The suit, filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan on April 5, claims Scimone owns 70 percent interest in Lighthouse and Cassidy has a 5 percent stake. The complaint said that Vivian Serota’s son Daniel also benefits in the deal because he was named a property manager for Lighthouse. The suit also alleges that Scimone has a conflict of interest because he was not only the chief financial officer of the companies, but was the executor of Serota’s will and a trustee of other trusts set up after his death.

Scimone is the trustee of Serota Islip, a trust set up years ago to develop the Holbrook project. Both Charles and Geoffrey Serota are “income beneficiaries” of the Islip development, but have no control over its stewardship.

Spokeswoman Judy White said Serota Islip is a separate trust that won’t be impacted by the litigation. The development, Islip Pines, which requires a change from its present industrial zoning, is currently being considered by the Town of Islip.

“The Islip Pines proposal will continue to move forward with the town and in our meetings with the community,” White wrote in an emailed statement.

The Islip Pines plan includes 200 workforce housing residences, about 475,000 square feet of retail and more than a million square feet of office and industrial space for the vacant parcel at the corner of Sunrise Highway and Veterans Memorial Highway.

The development company had proposed to build several big-box stores on the industrial-zoned property in 1999 but was rebuffed by the Suffolk County Planning Commission.